Black Women’s Bodies in the Portuguese Colonial Visual Archive (1900-1975)

• Autor(a) principal: Vicente, Filipa Lowndes
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/34760
• topic: Photography; Visual Culture; Colonialism; images of black women; Portuguese

The pervasiveness of images of black women’s unclothed bodies in the Portuguese colonial visual archive from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s—in photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibition ephemera or as illustrations in newspapers—demonstrates that the gendered and racialized body of (unnamed) women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony. The Portuguese colonial context, similar to other colonial contexts, reveals the banalization of the practice of white men photographing black colonized women. Is resistance or participation in the “event of photography” possible for these photographed women? This article will discuss some of the issues and challenges of dealing with these images through specific case studies: postcards of semi-naked African women between the ethnographic and the erotic; images of women exhibited in colonial exhibitions; private photographs of Portuguese soldiers next to African women; but also the counter narratives to an hegemonic visuality. Where are these images now? Where were they in the past? Who saw them and in what contexts? How were they kept and classified? How were they reproduced? Their endless potential for reproduction, circulation and intermediality points to the heterogeneous nature of this legacy. How can we decolonize this visual archive? The question of ethics, one which scholars, curators and archivists have been debating for the past few decades, will also be addressed. Reproducing and exhibiting images of abuse and exploitation might replicate what one seems to criticize. Are the university, the archive, the museum, or the academic journal critical enough to counteract the risks of perpetuating the violence?